Thursday, April 3, 2008

PortlandI went to Portland last weekend to visit my good friend from college, Jeremy, and to go to a game convention. I learned that the city was named by the people who founded it, one was from Portland Maine, the other from Boston Mass. I understand they flipped a coin to determine which of their home cities to name it after... so Portland was a coin toss away from being named Boston!

I won't go into the details of the trip, suffice it to say that I played a lot of games at the convention, and even some Rock Band. The best news is that a publisher asked for a copy of my friend Alex's game Homesteaders (which I helped him work on, and I carry around with me to these conventions) to take with him and try out. If he likes it, he'll publish it, and Alex and I will get our name on the box, among other things. Getting my name on the box of a good game would be awesome, and it's one of my goals, so this is somewhat exciting news.

IntrospectionJeremy's a great guy, and I always like visiting him or when he comes home to visit. On the plane flight home I was thinking about how some of my friends, like Jeremy and Nate, are really good people; they're intelligent, they speak their minds, they have opinions they believe in and they don't care what other people think. At the same time they are invariably tolerant, collected, and downright well adjusted people. I used to think I was tolerant, but lately my patience runs thin for all kinds of unreasonable reasons. I'd like to say I don't care what other people think, but the truth is that's probably all I care about most of the time.

I'd like to be a better person, and I'm glad I have friends like Jeremy and Nate to look on as an example of the kind of person I'd like to be. With this in mind, maybe I can start to be that kind of person myself.